Prime Minister of Northern Ireland announces her resignation

 

The Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, announced on Wednesday April 28 his resignation, the victim of a sling in his party linked to the consequences of Brexit on the British province. Arlene Foster, key in the UK exit negotiations, said she would step down as head of her party, the DUP, at the end of May and her post as head of local government at the end of June, in a statement broadcast by his party. “Once he is elected, I will work with the new leader on the arrangements for the transition,” she said.

His departure comes at a difficult time for Northern Ireland, where Brexit has rekindled the community tensions at the origin of the Troubles, the three decades of violence between Catholics in favor of reunification with Ireland and Protestants in favor of the crown. British. These clashes, in which the British army intervened, left some 3,500 dead until the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998.

A real weight on the Brexit negotiations

Arlene Foster, 50, a believer in her province’s union with the British crown, returned to being Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in January 2020, having previously had to step down from her post, entangled in a scandal over the management of subsidies for renewable energies. During the Brexit negotiations, the DUP’s kingmaking role in the Parliament of London, where it secured a fragile majority in Theresa May’s government, allowed it to influence the negotiations with Brussels, with the party calling for a separation clear and crisp with the EU.

But after the landslide victory of Boris Johnson’s conservatives in the 2019 legislative elections, which ended the role of the DUP, this lawyer by training was unable to prevent the establishment of customs controls between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Brittany. This provision provided for by the Brexit agreement creates a customs border in the Irish Sea to prevent the return of a separation between the province and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU. The postponement of most of the controls decided unilaterally by London did not prevent the anger of the Unionists, to the point of provoking ten days of riots in early April, of unprecedented violence for years.

Drop of water fueling the sling: Arlene Foster’s decision to abstain during the vote, in April, by the local Parliament of a motion calling for a ban on conversion therapy for homosexuals, an attitude considered too timid by the most fundamentalists of his training, with an ultraconservative vision in terms of mores.


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